The following article appeared in The Huffington Post in September 2013.
God doesn’t care about you. He — I say ‘He’ for convenience, but imagine ‘She’, or ‘S/He’, or ‘She-Ra’, if you like — doesn’t care about anyone in particular.
God doesn’t care who wins the college football national championship or American Idol. He doesn’t care whose house is spared from a tornado or whose city gets flooded by a hurricane. Maybe God once gave a lewd look to Mother Teresa after a few glasses of Manischewitz, but that’s it.
God doesn’t care about countries or peoples. We know this because all nations and peoples have claimed to be God’s people, but God has not offered an official endorsement on any of the major networks. Until that happens, I say He’s holding out for better candidates.
God doesn’t care what you do with your private parts. For example, some people out there really think that God gets angry if a woman loves a woman or a man loves a man.
God is the creator of the universe. He is the architect of a fabulous cosmo-tastic machine whose true dimensions we will never fully comprehend. Yet these people are convinced that this incredible and inconceivable being gets pissy if some guy sticks his Oscar Meyer Weiner into some other guy’s Gravy Train.
Doesn’t the Prime Mover have anything better to do than to get angry at stuff like this? I mean, the Pope now seems cool with gays, for Chrissake.
And while we’re talking about the Pope, God doesn’t care about your religion.
I’ve heard people say that Gandhi was a nice guy, but he wasn’t a Christian. So when he died, he went to hell.
Think about that. Great person, great works, great philosophy, but born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong faith. Sorry, pal — everlasting torment for you. Them’s the breaks!
Assume, for a moment, that God really does care about all these things.
Let’s suppose that the omnipresent and omniscient owner of everything only feels appreciated when Tebow does a knee-bend after a touchdown.
That He gets really, really hot and bothered by gay love.
That He is willing, even eager, to torture people for eternity just because they didn’t worship Him using the right words, in the right way, while wearing the right funny hat, or they didn’t bow down to the divine presence when He appeared in a Pasadena restaurant taco.
What would that tell us about God?
Is He a voyeur? A jester? A lunatic? A masochist? Is He really so capricious and hateful as some of His followers would have us believe?
Such a small, clownish and ridiculous God does not exist except in the imaginations of those who are jealous of other people’s joy. A God like that is a psychological projection of His believers. They do not worship God. They worship themselves, their interests and their prejudices and they call that faith.
I refuse to believe that God is so cruel and petty. He thinks bigger than that.
So what does He care about?
God cares about life.
The universe is a Petri dish. God swirled the happy juice around, poured us into the dish, put us in the incubator, and now he’s on the outside looking in, seeing what grows. What lives and what dies. What works and what doesn’t.
So don’t look to God to help you pay your credit card bills or pick your lucky lottery numbers. He doesn’t care. Like it or not, we’re on our own.
But I think God gives us a sense of what He’d like to see. He gives us love. Love is the lubricant of life. Without love, life is a desert. With love, life is a garden.
So while God may not care about individuals, nations, peoples or religions, God does care about love between them.
I think that God is hoping that a species comes along that treasures love and life as much as He does.
That’s not us.
At least not yet.